As the boomers have held on to generous jobs and benefits, their children have given up on raising families, writes demographer Joel Kotkin.

In Madrid you see them on the streets, jobless, aimless, often bearing college degrees but working as cabbies, baristas, street performers, or—more often—not at all. In Spain as in Greece, nearly half of the adults under 25 don’t work.

Call them the screwed generation, the victims of expansive welfare states and the massive structural debt charged by their parents. In virtually every developed country, and increasingly in developing ones, they include not only the usual victims, the undereducated and recent immigrants, but also the college-educated.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the European Union’s Club Med of Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy, the focal point of the emerging new economic crisis. There’s a growing sense of hopelessness in these places, where debt is turning politics into an ugly choice between austerity, which reduces present opportunities, or renewed emphasis on public spending, which all but guarantees major problems in the bond market, and spending promises that can’t be kept.

“We don’t know what to do now,” Jaime, a Madrid waiter in his late 20s told me last week. “My wife lost her auditor’s job, and I can’t support the whole family. Maybe we have to move somewhere like Dubai or maybe Miami.”

Many young Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards already have made their moves, with a half million leaving Spain alone last year. But it’s not just Club Med youths who are contemplating greener pastures. Ireland, which in recent decades actually attracted new migrants, is exporting a thousand people a week. In recession-wracked Britain, nearly half of the population say they would like to move elsewhere.

Spain unemployment

Driving this exodus is a growing perception that this collapse is not cyclical but secular. Increasingly, young Europeans are deciding not to start families—the key to future growth—in reaction to the recession. The stories about divorced Spanish or Italian young fathers sleeping on the streets or in their cars are not exactly a strong advertising for parenthood.

Even in once-rigidly Catholic Spain, marriage and fertility rates have been falling for decades, and family structure weakening. Spaniards are having fewer children now than they did during the brutal civil war of the late 1930s. Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, a Madrid-based management consultant, in his 2011 book, El Suicidio Demográfico de España, points out that the actual number of Spanish newborns has declined to an 18th-century level.

Only those connected with the government, or able to ride asset inflation, will do well in the new “progressive” order.

This demographic implosion makes sense given the legacy left behind by the boomers, who have held on to generous jobs and benefits but left little opportunity for their children, not to mention a high tax burden on what opportunities they do find. For a generation academics have sold higher education—the more the better—as the cure for unemployment and the great guarantor of success. Yet rising education rates in places like Spain have not created jobs for the rising generation, but only expanded unemployment and falling wages among the ranks of the educated.

Even America, traditionally a beneficiary of European woes, seems to have turned on its young. College debt is crushing many young people with degrees—particularly those outside the sciences and engineering—that are not easily marketable. The spiking number of people in their 30s working as unpaid interns reflects this erosion of opportunity. This has happened even as the price tag for college has shot up; 94 percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree now owe money for their educations, compared to 45 percent two decades ago. Here’s a tribute to futility: today a majority of unemployed Americans age 25 and older attended college, something never before seen.

Governmental priorities here continue to favor boomers and seniors over the young. For a generation, transfer payments have favored the elderly, a trend likely to accelerate as the boomers continue retiring and demand their due. According to Brookings, America spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children.

Forced to take lower wages if they can find work at all and facing still-expensive housing in those markets where many of the jobs are, roughly one in five American adults 25 to 34 now live with their parents—almost double the percentage from 30 years ago. Increasingly both Wall Street and green “progressives” urge young people to abandon homeownership for a poorer, more crowded life in expensive, high-density apartment blocks.

Across the developed world, wages are being cut for young Americans, Europeans, and Japanese as politicians prefer to offer less to the young than to take anything away from those already ensconced in employment, particularly if organized into unions. In the U.S., everything from government jobs to employment in auto factories and even supermarkets is now on a two-tier track, with older workers’ guaranteed pensions and higher salaries not shared by newer hires.

Pensions represent a bigger generational issue than salaries do. The European welfare state makes America’s seem Scrooge-ish. Their lifetime guarantees are so extensive, and unsustainable, that even the über-frugal Germans are calling for a special tax on younger workers to fund their parents’ pensions.

This generational transfer will likely be accelerated by an aging electorate. In Spain, notes Larumbe, voters over 60 now make up more than 30 percent of the electorate, up from 22 percent in 1977; in 2050 they will constitute close to a majority. The same patterns can be seen in other European countries and, although less dramatically, in the U.S. as well.

As a result, boomer- and senior-dominated parties, both right and left, generally end up screwing young people. This occurs even as they proclaim their fulsome concern for “future generations.”

Politicians on the right, in Europe and elsewhere, scapegoat immigrants in part to hold on to their share of older votes. Left-wing analysts rightly point out that the boomer- and senior-dominated Tea Party here is not likely to cut their own entitlements, preferring instead to push cutbacks in education and other disbursements that aid the young while fighting spending on job creation and productive forms of infrastructure investment.

Politicians on the left, meanwhile, tend to favor redistribution and “sustainability” over the new wealth creation critical for youthful advancement. Many boomers seem to suspect economic growth itself, as when John Holdren, now President Obama’s senior science adviser, back in the 1970s called for the “de-development” of high-income countries. A cynic might conclude that since the progressive boomers already got theirs, it’s fine for the young to live in an era of limits.

With the kind of tax and regulatory regime advocated by today’s regressive progressives—already largely adopted in my home state of California—greens and their allies many not have to worry about too much new growth. Only those connected with the government, or able to ride asset inflation, will do well in the new “progressive” order.

In Europe, east Asia, and America alike, the left and the right have both proven unprepared or unwilling to address the fundamental growth crisis facing the next generation. Neither austerity nor a “progressive” focus on greater government spending and “sustainability” can create the jobs and new opportunities so sorely lacking on the streets of Athens and Madrid and increasingly in American cities as well.

The developed world’s youth shouldn’t expect much help from an older generation that has preserved its generous arrangements at the cost of increasingly stark prospects for its own progeny. Instead the emerging generation needs to push its own new agenda for economic growth and expanded opportunity.

How is any of this a "new progressive" order? Europe and the US have both been moving away from the "progressive" agenda for the last couple of decades. Social welfare programs and education aid have been slashed and now continue to be slashed in the name of "austerity."

Britain has been moving away from it for decades. Anyway the article is a simplistic scape-goat on olds. This crisis did not begin because of social security or high taxes. If we had the growth rates of the not too distant past these issues would be easily manageable.

lol please. These cuts have resulted from a shit economy and our shit economy is the result of things like the financialization of the US economy; globalization; corporatist policies in education, healthcare, and banking; growing income inequality etc. Some it can't be controlled (globalization) but others are the result of stupid policies. Yes there is plenty of pension abuse but this represents a very tiny part of the American economy and is not the cause of our current woes.

What percentage of boomers have massive state gov employment pensions anyway? Most boomers will have a worse retirement than their parents who were more likely to have private sector pensions, contribution plans that were invested in a stock market that grew exponentially, and lower costs in the items that matter (energy, healthcare).

there are many causes of the crappy situation for youngs. all the stuff you listed are included. but the bloated pension system is a serious problem and the fact that unions are beholden to their pension funds (invested with our FRIENDS on wall st) affects their hiring and retention practices. unions are very corrupt and protectionist on this issue. i'm not for getting rid of pension funds because i buy into the cutting taxes or balanced budget reptile flame, i'm for cutting pension funding to use that money to fund programs to help youngs.

most boomers will have a worse retirement because of their own crappy, short-sighted choices, like dumping their "savings" into the stock market or trying to treat their houses like assets appreciating forever. that is, unless they make us pay for their retirements.

You would characterize boomer investment in the stock market (say mid-70s until today) to have been short-sighted? Instead their "savings" should have sat in a bank account at 1.5% a year? In 1970 the Dow Industrial Average was 838, it hit 13000 earlier this year.

They'll have worse retirements because the economy went into the shitter. I'm all for more investment in R&D and in industries other than old-people care. However, people have to understand that your average boomer is just a regular person who's been screwed and ultimately won't be receiving all that much. Most don't have pensions. Many have paid at least of portion of their child's outrageous tuition. They've faced massive increases in the cost of healthcare and energy. Their wages have been stagnant for over 3 decades. SS is not all that generous and unless you have a decent amount of savings to supplement it you're barely above poverty.

You can't assign blame on an average boomer for the complex financial events that have taken place over the past few decades.

the boomer mentality allowed this to take place. they completely lack a sense of community and responsibility for others. in their own pursuit of happiness above all else they fell for an economic and political doctrine that was epic flame from day one. the entire generation got trolled while certain people made off like bandits.

i blame the boomer idiot who refinanced his house to send his kid to some shit private school and is now underwater. i blame the boomer idiot who gave him the loan. i blame the boomers in his neighborhood and community who sat back and said "it's not my problem" over and over again (and then lost their job in the massive recession caused by boomers A and B screwing up).

I'm sick of hearing so much about gay marriage. I don't care about it and I'm sick of it taking up all the airtime, thought share, bandwidth, ink etc that it does. We have major structural issues in the US that need to be addressed somehow. Gay marriage and similar distractions (e.g., abortion) are not that fucking important and the endless rumination about them is one of the things that keeps us from actually solving our problems.

exactly. there are already 100 boomer interest groups devoted to every cause imaginable. except for looking out for youngs. i guess it is not prestigious enough for the junior strivers who fetch the coffee and blow the directors at all the non-profits and on the hill.

The problem is, the ones who can afford to be politically active are intelligent and/or the children of rich parents and don't give a fuck about the economic issues of pedestrian middle class whites since they, as rich kids, have already got theirs (just like the boomers)

Remember this also - boomers developed feminism and diversity initiatives to throw more and more labor supply into the workforce but to compete for the same jobs. So now 3 times as many people are applying for the same amount of jobs, lowering wages and creating extra burdens on businesses to avoid discrmination lawsuits.